Word: mailer
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...fashionable to call Norman Mailer the bad boy of American literature and leave it at that. The underground stories about him circulate, and the incidents he provokes have become legend. Who has not heard about his poetry reading at the 92nd St. YMHA in New York, when officials rang down the curtain during a performance for the first time in twenty years? Or his nomination of Hemingway for President? Or his own candidacy for Mayor of New York? Or his belief that plastic causes cancer? Mailer, the cynics say, is "paceless, tasteless, and graceless...
...Please do not understand me too quickly," Mailer writes, and almost everything about the man disproves the Establishment's caricature of him as a fire-breathing, bad-mouthing ogre, whose only literary impulse is to fuel his own ego. Mailer is kind to children, careful to remember acquaintances' names, and polite even to the boorish fan who traps him after a reading with a five-minute, existential question...
...Mailer looks the heavy but more characteristically acts the role of the nation's thumb-wrestling champ. He used to hold the world title too, he says, but he was whipped one night by a Mexican bullfighter who had learned the sport that day. "I wonder," Mailer muses, looking off into the distance, "if he realized what he won." Because thumb-wrestling is not just a diversion for Mailer--he gives himself to it as totally as he does to his writing, his family, and his friends. "Norman is great at thumb-wrestling," says an old friend, "because...
...instinct for the jugular may be the most important drive behind his work. In the back of his mind, Mailer admits, he too has been running for President, and at the very least, the last 25 years have been spent publicly campaigning for the title of Great American Novelist. He entered Harvard at 16, a skinny Brooklyn kid who wanted to study aeronautical engineering. But he discovered Farrell, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck in his first term, and knew then that he wanted to be a novelist. As a junior, he won Story magazine's fiction prize; at the Advocate...
Then came the war, Mailer bet that Europe would be the stage for the great war novel, but the army put him in the South Pacific--giving him, he later said, the best backrop for The Naked and the Dead. Mailer came to feel that a war novel about Europe would have to include a good deal of commentary about the decline of its civilization; in the Pacific, he found that he could write about the American military in isolation...